was it not

This dusky song from the Marian Hill duo of Samantha Gongol and Jeremy Lloyd finds Gongol looking back on a past relationship and trying to remember what's real. The memories are jumbled - was this guy from the lake? Is he the one who taught her to count the stars? It's all flickering in and out like a dream. In a Songfacts interview with Marian Hill, Gongol said: "We both just turned 30 and we look back 10 years ago and realize that one little romance we had or that one magical night maybe wasn't as we remember. You question it, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Life goes on and a person or experience that meant a lot to you at one time might not hold the same significance, and now you can't even remember why." Lloyd added: "It felt like a theme we could only access due to being a little bit older and a little wiser. It was cool to feel like we tapped into new territory that hadn't been available to us before, and like Sam says, it isn't making any value judgement about these memories and past relationships. It isn't saying, 'I'm glad I'm out of that one,' or, 'It was the best I ever had.' It's more like an interesting in-between. You look back on something that 10 years ago meant everything to you and what your whole life was supposed to be about, and there's something magical about how you used to feel that way and you were so young and everything was so new and fresh, and then there's something strange about just how that feeling feels now and how the specifics can kind of fall away or get blurry when you try to zero in on them."

Released on February 12, 2020, "Was It Not" is the title track and lead single from Marian Hill's third EP. By the time the EP was released on March 18, most of the world was on lockdown from coronavirus and the duo had to cancel their tour.

The music video, directed by Mitch DeQuilettes and Bel Downie, has the hazy feel of the song as different people come in and out of frame and we're not sure which ones are real. Gongol and Lloyd had their own idea for the video - they wanted it set in a snow globe. That proved beyond their budget.